MickeyAll time favourite TV shows...
There are a few shows that will always have a special place in my heart. I watch a lot of TV and have loved a lot of programs but there are two shows that I think changed and shaped my life.
Number one was Home Improvement. In my early high school years my best friend was in love with Jonathan Taylor Thomas (who wasn’t) so I dutifully fell in love with the older brother Brad who was played by Zachery Ty Bryan. We lived in a small town in the country and one of my happiest memories is sitting by the river on a summer day and making up stories about how we’d go to LA one day and woo the boys to fall in love with us. I remember being thirteen years old and crying when a signed picture and a form letter arrived from Zach. It was a happy time. I also remember the episode where Tim doesn’t want to part with this horrible, hairy sweater that Jill keeps trying to slip into the Goodwill bin and realizing that my Dad had a very similar sweater in his closet. My Dad was also accident prone and was always injuring himself while doing home handyman projects. Not as bad as Tim, but even now I still see similarities between my real Dad and my TV Dad. (Yep, that’s how I think of Tim the Toolman Taylor, as my TV Dad)
Quite a few years later, CSI became my second all time favourite show. It was an obsession that crept up on me and didn’t really start until around the end of the fourth season. I caught a few episodes on television when other people in my house were watching, I found the DVDs for the first half of season two cheap a few days later and bought them and after that I never looked back.
Around the same time that I discovered CSI, I also worked with a woman who introduced me to online fandom. She wrote Harry Potter fan fiction. I’d never actually heard of fan fiction. Since I couldn’t get my hands on any more CSI DVDs at the time and was desperate to learn a bit more about the characters who had intrigued me, I started reading CSI fan fiction. And then reviewing it. And then I started writing it. And through the contact with other fans, then I started chatting about it and writing in forums. I made friends on the other side of the world who after about a year of getting to know, I got on a plane and travelled from Australia to the USA to meet a few of them. And of course, while I was in Las Vegas, my friend and I were lucky that CSI was filming. Through the online fandom we knew a girl who knew a guy who was on the crew. So we met up with this guy, hung around while they were filming and met Billy Petersen and Jorja Fox. A few days later I was in LA and was invited to go onto the CSI set where I again spoke to Jorja, met Wallace Langham and nearly ran into Robert David Hall when he was leaving. I got up on the autopsy table and played dead, I sat in Grissom’s chair and I watched while they filmed. It was an amazing experience and when I look back at it, I realize that apart from the magic falling in love with someone famous part, I managed to do with CSI what my friend and I had always pictured doing when we were children.
These days I think CSI: NY is actually the better show, but because of the opportunities CSI gave me, it will always be the one that wins the all time favourite place for me.
I’d be interested to know what other people’s all time favourites are and a bit of a story as to why they’re your all time favourites.
Number one was Home Improvement. In my early high school years my best friend was in love with Jonathan Taylor Thomas (who wasn’t) so I dutifully fell in love with the older brother Brad who was played by Zachery Ty Bryan. We lived in a small town in the country and one of my happiest memories is sitting by the river on a summer day and making up stories about how we’d go to LA one day and woo the boys to fall in love with us. I remember being thirteen years old and crying when a signed picture and a form letter arrived from Zach. It was a happy time. I also remember the episode where Tim doesn’t want to part with this horrible, hairy sweater that Jill keeps trying to slip into the Goodwill bin and realizing that my Dad had a very similar sweater in his closet. My Dad was also accident prone and was always injuring himself while doing home handyman projects. Not as bad as Tim, but even now I still see similarities between my real Dad and my TV Dad. (Yep, that’s how I think of Tim the Toolman Taylor, as my TV Dad)
Quite a few years later, CSI became my second all time favourite show. It was an obsession that crept up on me and didn’t really start until around the end of the fourth season. I caught a few episodes on television when other people in my house were watching, I found the DVDs for the first half of season two cheap a few days later and bought them and after that I never looked back.
Around the same time that I discovered CSI, I also worked with a woman who introduced me to online fandom. She wrote Harry Potter fan fiction. I’d never actually heard of fan fiction. Since I couldn’t get my hands on any more CSI DVDs at the time and was desperate to learn a bit more about the characters who had intrigued me, I started reading CSI fan fiction. And then reviewing it. And then I started writing it. And through the contact with other fans, then I started chatting about it and writing in forums. I made friends on the other side of the world who after about a year of getting to know, I got on a plane and travelled from Australia to the USA to meet a few of them. And of course, while I was in Las Vegas, my friend and I were lucky that CSI was filming. Through the online fandom we knew a girl who knew a guy who was on the crew. So we met up with this guy, hung around while they were filming and met Billy Petersen and Jorja Fox. A few days later I was in LA and was invited to go onto the CSI set where I again spoke to Jorja, met Wallace Langham and nearly ran into Robert David Hall when he was leaving. I got up on the autopsy table and played dead, I sat in Grissom’s chair and I watched while they filmed. It was an amazing experience and when I look back at it, I realize that apart from the magic falling in love with someone famous part, I managed to do with CSI what my friend and I had always pictured doing when we were children.
These days I think CSI: NY is actually the better show, but because of the opportunities CSI gave me, it will always be the one that wins the all time favourite place for me.
I’d be interested to know what other people’s all time favourites are and a bit of a story as to why they’re your all time favourites.
stu kicks
Horrorphile
~ Fawlty Towers
~ The Young Ones
~ The Office
~ Twin Peaks (first two seasons)
~ Moonlighting (first two seasons)
~ Six Feet Under (first two seasons)
~ Entourage
~ Shameless (first two seasons)
~ Hill Street Blues (first few seasons)
~ Action
~ Freaks and Geeks
~ Flight of the Conchords
... that's all I can think of at the moment, although curious to note that most of the shows I've listed are comedies.
stu kicks